Super Bobble Bobble has the 'Super Bubble Bobble' code (see "Bubble Bobble" entrie) in dip switch. Also, this bootleg has a new feature in Dip switch where you may control the speed of monsters.

The monsters 'Mighta', 'Hidegonsu', and 'Drunk' do not throw their projectile weapons (i.e. 'Mighta' does not throw his slow-moving stone balls, 'Hidegonsu' does not throw his fast-moving fireballs, and 'Drunk' does not throw his boomerang bottles). However, the 'Invader' monster, who appears in 'normal' mode only, does throw his laser projectile.

- 6th June 2010: Corrado Tomaselli dumped Bubble Bobble (Korea 1986). Kold666 thinks that the Korean company manufacturing and assembling PCB for Taito had a license to sell them in Korea. All customs are Taito originals, but the general assembly is bootleg style. Maybe this is the "mother" of all Bubble Bobble bootlegs.

- 5th August 2006: Nicola Salmoria - As you'd probably noticed, the pics in the previous post are of the Bubble Bobble custom MCU. Despite being one of the most popular games of all times, and having been in MAME for many years, the emulation of this game has never been perfect due to the lack of the original ROM for the MCU. For some time, we had been using a 68705 program found in a bootleg board, believing it had been extracted from the original. However, monster behaviour was wrong and there were other problems, like the wrong behaviour of the clock item. After some study of the program and of the game schematics, it became clear that the original MCU is not a 68705 at all (the pinout doesn't match) but looked more like a 68701. The 68705 program had been written from scratch by the bootleggers using black box reverse engineering techniques, by running the original MCU and logging all its reads and writes from memory. Indeed, the 68705 program does a lot of reads from memory without doing anything with them--simply because the original MCU would read that memory and do some unknown action with it. Eventually, the useless 68705 program was replaced by simulation code inside the emulator, which greatly improved the emulation accuracy. Monster behaviour was improved, the clock item behaviour fixed. However, there were still some unknown things, like how the randomisation of the EXTEND bubbles really worked. At last, thanks to excellent work by Trinity, the original MCU ROM has been extracted. This required removing the cover from the chip, taking photographs of it under a microscope, and manually decoding the contents of the ROM bit by bit. The photo shown in the previous post confirms that it's in the 6801 class, not a 68701 however as it was conjectured, but a 6801U4. With this ROM, we finally have the final piece of the puzzle for a 100% guaranteed perfect emulation. Checking the original MCU program was very interesting. It was designed to provide many protection features that were eventually not used by the game, like: * Process coin inputs and update the credit counter * Handle the number of remaining lives for both players * Handle the current round number * Handle variable speed incrementing for four variables and * Return values from a 1280 bytes table of seemingly random data. The reasons why those features were not used are probably various. Some of them were probably awkward to use because they require to one one frame for the MCU to process the data, others weren't flexible enough like the coin input processing that wouldn't allow for coinage settings different from the ones hardcoded in the MCU (though versions of Bubble Bobble with different coinage settings don't seem to have been made anyway).So, how close was the simulation to the real thing? Very close; "too good", actually. Let's see why. The clock item behaviour was spot on, but off by one frame (the simulation made the counter expire one frame too late). The EXTEND randomisation simply doesn't exist in the original MCU. While the simulation code used a RNG to provide truly random letters, the original MCU simply increases the counter every frame. This seriously affects the game, making the EXTEND letters predictable. Since a new bubble enters the screen exactly 128 frames after the previous one, and the remainder of 128 / 6 is 2, this means that if you get consecutive letters each one will be 2 places after the previous one. So if you get 3 letters you can get either E, T, N or X, E, D. After that they will repeat. There are exceptions, though: if you create a new bubble in exactly the same frame when a new bubble should enter the screen, the bubble is delayed by one frame. So by timing the fire button exactly right you can change the bubble order. In theory you could get all 6 letters in a single level--let me know if you manage to do that! Also, new bubbles will not appear if there are already 16 bubbles on the screen, so that will change the order as well. The last, and most important, thing that the MCU does is compare the player coordinates with the monsters. The results are returned as flags indicating whether each coordinate is >, =, or - 0.106u12: MASH added plds ($0, 200, 400 - pal16r4.u36, pal16l8.u38 and pal16l8.u4) to clone Bobble Bobble.

- 24th February 2006: Nicola Salmoria - The emulation of Bubble Bobble is already virtually perfect, but there is still a doubt about the clock item. Currently, when you pick it up the enemies stop but the bubbles continue moving. It would make sense if the bubbles stopped moving too, and this idea is corroborated by the way variables are set up in the MCU shared RAM. The MCU would be responsible for stopping the bubbles and make them start again when the clock effect ends. What we need is to verify the behaviour on an original board. Bootlegs don't count (the clock behaviour is definitely wrong in them), nor do other emulator or ports count. Only the original board matters. Can anyone help?

- 0.35b3: Support for the ORIGINAL version of Bubble Bobble, with 68705 code from a pirate board. Wizards *do* throw stones in this version [Nicola Salmoria]. Also fixed big sprites in Tokio, and unified it with Bubble Bobble. Added M6805 (1.5 MHz) CPU4. The original version is the only one where wizards throw stones. The protection feature which randomizes the EXTEND letters in the original version is not emulated properly. Nicola fixed also big sprites in Tokio and unified it with Bubble Bobble.

- 0.34RC2: Fixed YM2203/YM3526 clock speeds to 3MHz.

- 0.34b8: Changed YM-3812 sound to YM-3526.

- 0.34b2: The music in Bubble Bobble seems to stay in sync now [Tatsuyuki Satoh].

- 0.28: New osd_modify_pen() function, proposed by Aaron Giles. It allows drivers to dynamically modify the palette. WARNING: Since this feature can severely reduce performance on some systems, it must only be used when necessary - that is, when the emulated game dynamically modifies the palette. The other games should continue to use the static palette as before. Many games already use this feature (e.g. Crystal Castles, the Gottlieb games, Tapper, Bubble Bobble, and many others). There's also osd_get_pen(), which is used by usrintf.c to dynamically pick the pens used to render menus.

- 0.27: Chris Moore added Bubble Bobble (Taito 1986) and clone Bobble Bobble (bootleg). Sound effect codes from Oliver White. Drivers are now allowed to modify the RAM and ROM pointers to implement bank switching [Nicola Salmoria]. Bubble Bobble uses this. Be careful: When using this feature, you cannot use the standard MRA_RAM and MWA_RAM memory hooks to access RAM. Control: Arrows = Move around, ALT =Jump and CTRL = Fire. Known issues: The original version doesn't seem to behave correctly, probably due to the copy protection. Use the bootleg instead. The colors are accurate, but the color space is downgraded from 4x4x4 to 3x3x2.